Some Of Mass Effect: Andromeda's Animations Are Hilariously Bad

Ahead of the release on March 21st, Mass Effect: Andromeda received a 10 hour trial that allowed people with EA Access to play a week ahead of release. Well, some people have noticed that some of Mass Effect: Andromeda's animations are hilariously bad.

Over on Twitter, users like Nathan Ranney have posted up gif snippets from some early segments of Mass Effect: Andromeda, where we see a waddle-legged Sara Ryder moving up and down the steps as if she's moving while sitting on a stool.

The effect comes from quickly moving her up and down the steps as her legs attempt to adjust to the incline/decline of the geometry. In result, her knees raise and spread, creating a hilarious situation where it looks like she's stamping around. If you keep this up long enough she appears to get stuck going up and down the steps with the waddle-leg effect.

Another gif from the same user also shows Sara throwing a punch at the bar. What makes it so funny? Well, her fist doesn't at all connect with the person she's punching.

It's quite funny because there's an obvious reaction from the guy getting hit, complete with sweat effects emanating from where the punch is supposed to connect, but her fist doesn't actually make contact.

Usually this happens when the character animation rigs aren't properly aligned when going through the animation sets. Given that in Mass Effect: Andromeda players can choose between Scott and Sara, there's the potentiality that Sara's fist doesn't connect because she's smaller than Scott, and the animators may not have moved her forward in the rig to compensate for the size difference.

For some games they re-rig or re-animate some scenes for males and females separately to avoid these kind of issues, because physically the real life actor sizes are obviously different and this greatly affects collision detection and interactions with characters in-game as well.

Twitter user bobvids also shared another glitch, featuring a character stuck in a t-pose.

The hashtag was at one point filled with people pointing out various issues with the game. However, to be fair, the t-pose is something a lot of games run into at some point or another. It's a common animation glitch, especially when the game relies heavily on motion captured animations, like Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Even still, while some of the issues people have pointed out are obviously glitches, other issues aren't glitches at all but simply the way the game is designed and animated. It's a pretty big issue for some people who are used to a certain standard of quality from a BioWare game, especially given that a decade ago Mass Effect 1 was one of the staple examples of how to do animation and dialogue interaction sequences right. In fact, a lot of companies used BioWare's dialogue template that they originally introduced in Knights of the Old Republic from the OG Xbox as a way to cinematically depict character interactions.

Regardless of the memes, gifs and criticisms of the animations, Mass Effect: Andromeda is due for release this upcoming Tuesday on March 21st.